On March 27, the world lost one of its sharpest minds ever, in the fields of human psychology and behavioural economics. Daniel Kahneman was the undisputed master of the study of decision-making, judgment, heuristics, biases and human rationality. Getting the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002 for his work, Kahneman finally put down all his thoughts and theories into one awesome compilation that he called ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ in 2011.
As brand managers and marketers, all of us, inadvertently, have used one or more of his ‘behavioural patterns’ in our work. I unabashedly dipped my hands into DK’s work and do admit to not crediting him for the same in innumerable PPTs. I hope there are a few more like me as, going by one of his patterns, I too am a victim of the ‘confirmation bias’.
Given that the world’s largest reality show is going to commence from April 19, the ‘dance of democracy’, through the seven chapters of its recital, would be a delectable ground for testing his key human behaviour patterns. On his behalf, here is my attempt at the same.
Let us take each of the 10 key patterns DK espouses and contextualise it to the Indian parliamentary elections.
Our brain uses two systems: System 1 and System 2
System 1 is fast, intuitive and automatic. It is prone to biases and errors such as overconfidence.
System 2 is slow, analytical, and deliberate. It is necessary for complex tasks requiring focused attention.
System 1 is what most political parties resort to in their communication for the electorate. They are ably joined in by many media vehicles who leave no stone unturned to amplify these pieces of communication, building a smokescreen of rationality and people-speak.
System 2 is what the ‘woke’ community indulges in, focusing on the actual issues at hand that need to be addressed in the communication campaigns rather than hubris.
System 1 brain says that the lord shall redeem the faithful soon. System 2 brain reminds you that you are still unemployed.
Irrationality
Humans are not rational. We all make a lot of irrational mistakes.
We will vote for personalities and not issues. We will vote for promises, most of which never get fulfilled, and not for present performance. We laud those who posture and not those who have the capability to actually perform. Right from middle school we are taught to ‘look before we leap’. From childhood, we are taught that ‘man is a rational animal’. Yet, as a voter, I think I understand what the nation needs better than the others and I am smarter than those around me.
Prospect theory
A personal favourite, the prospect theory suggests that people feel losses twice as hard as gains.
DK cites an example that many people don’t want to play a ‘Heads or Tails’ game where they can win $100 but risk losing $50. He goes on to suggest that one should take this bet every single day!
So, it is shrewd and politically diabolical to spin the web of being ‘wronged’ for centuries together, magnifying the narrative of the deprivation and current ills as a result of the same. Such a story told in a compelling manner can sway the emotions and minds of the most rational of people. History holds up many such instances. As DK himself says, ‘A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.’
Halo Effect
The halo effect is a cognitive bias where your overall impression of a person influences your perception of their individual traits or qualities. If you like someone, you’ll overestimate their capabilities and vice versa.
Don’t we all know this. Culturally, we love creating demigods of mere mortals. We address them as ‘fathers’, ‘mothers’, ‘saviours’ and even ‘sewaks’. The opposite is also true. We incessantly denigrate and abuse someone we do not support. We address them as ‘libtards’, ‘presstitutes’ and ‘pappus’. Little do we realise that verbal abuse is also a cognizable offence, yet we laud our political heroes when they frequently resort to the same, from interviews to rallies.
Availability heuristic
The availability heuristic is a cognitive bias where you judge the likelihood of an event based on how easily it comes to mind. Our behaviour during the pandemic is an example fresh in our memory.
DK says, ‘The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.’
Sunk cost fallacy
The sunk cost fallacy appears when you keep investing in something even if it’s not worth it, simply because you’ve already invested resources in it.
To put things in context, imagine the pain we had to endure finish a ‘Pathaan’ or ‘KGF’ just because you bought the ticket.
Similarly, in the election context, it’s about putting your weight behind a person or a premise not because you do not realise the fallacy of either but because you have been branded within your community as belonging to a certain ‘camp’. The emotional cost of moving out of line is just too high.
Confirmation bias
This is the classic one in most consumer research reports. People tend to seek out information that confirms their existing beliefs and ignore information that contradicts it.
DK says, “This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution”.
As a voter, always talk with people who have opposing views. It will be very insightful. We are currently in a state-of-collective-confirmation-bias where we go to any length to justify convenient lies, looking away from the inconvenient truths. And this applies to every political affiliation, right from an authoritarian streak to dynastic trends, anachronistic discourses to opportunistic divisiveness.
Hindsight bias
The tendency, after an event has occurred, to believe that one would have predicted or expected the outcome.
This is reserved for the June 4.
Framing effect
When the way information is presented influences your decisions and perceptions, we call it a framing effect.
We have always been fascinated with hyperbolic claims like ‘biggest’, ‘tallest’, ‘fastest’, ‘largest’ and ‘longest’. In fact, we have an entire book of records that chronicles such trivia. We prefer to see videos shouting ‘Politician A destroys Politician B’ than saying ‘Politicians A and B debate subject XYZ’. Even the nay-sayers resort to such methods of presenting claiming ‘the death of democracy’. This is like dhaba cooking… all masalas are added to anything that is cooked, just to make it spicier. Election campaigning does not move away from this recipe.
Anchoring effect
This is the last of the human behaviour patterns DK talks about. The anchoring effect is a bias where you rely too heavily on the first piece of information you receive when making a decision.
This is where media and the IT cells play such a crucial role in determining how much of fake news is both created and perpetuated before it gets called out by one of the anti-fake-news activists. The damage is already done as the first piece of communication has already been amplified through social media. That damage can never be undone. And that is what every political party, sadly, banks upon…the deliberately created and circulated fake news, as our regulatory checks and balances are too slow and ineffective.
I wish DK had visited India once in election time. He would have loved the empirical affirmations of the patterns he had painstakingly worked out. Having close to a billion people play out your biases and effects would be an experience of a lifetime.
As he says in his book, ‘The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognise other people’s mistakes than our own.’
Do not forget to revisit the ‘Hindsight Bias’ on June 4.
Jai Hind!
Avik Chattopadhyay is a Gurugram-based brand and business strategist and commentator. He is currently also working along with XLRI to set up the Indian School for Design of Automobiles. He writes on MxMIndia every other Thursday. His views here are personal.
We are exactly three weeks away from the first phase of polls in the General Elections. Expectedly, elections are dominating news coverage, and the action is only going to heat up over the next two months, leading up to the results on June 4.